The speakeasy aesthetic has been commercialised enough that "hidden bar" sometimes just means a normal bar with a password on a website. The cities on this list have something more interesting: a genuine tradition of drinking in basements, vaults, back rooms, and spaces that were never intended as bars, which produced a culture of discovering places rather than being directed to them.

The Cities

Budapest

Budapest's ruin bar scene is the most developed underground drinking culture in Europe. What started in the early 2000s as the occupation of derelict buildings in the old Jewish quarter of the VII district — bars that were genuinely temporary, built from salvage, operating on uncertain licences — has become an institution. Szimpla Kert is now famous enough to be on every itinerary — it even runs a farmers market on Sunday mornings — but the culture it represents has seeded dozens of other venues operating in cellars, inner courtyards, and abandoned factories across the city. The truly interesting bars in Budapest are still the ones you find in a courtyard behind an unmarked door.

Best for: The most original underground bar culture in Europe, still operating in the spaces that invented it.

Prague

Prague's cellar bar culture predates anything fashionable happening in western Europe. The city has been drinking in Gothic and Baroque vaulted basements for centuries, and the bars that operate in them range from the tourist-oriented to the genuinely local and indifferent to visitors. Vinohrady and Žižkov are the neighbourhoods where the cellar bars are good rather than merely atmospheric. Žižkov in particular has a density of basement and back-room bars that operate without concession to marketing.

Best for: Cellar bar culture with genuine historical architecture and no requirement to perform.

Edinburgh

Edinburgh's underground geography is extraordinarily useful for this purpose. The city is built over its own history: Mary King's Close, the South Bridge Vaults, and numerous wynds and closes contain spaces that have been bars, storage, and everything in between for several centuries. The bars operating in the vaults and underground streets of the Old Town are not purely tourist traps — some of the city's best whisky bars and live music venues operate in these spaces. The Grassmarket and Cowgate, sunken below the Royal Mile, have a concentration of underground bars that no other British city can match.

Best for: Bar culture with genuine underground architecture rather than a basement fitted out to look like one.

Berlin

Berlin's underground bars operate in bomb shelters, former East German industrial spaces, and building basements that survived reunification. The Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg areas have a number of cellar bars that predate the city's transformation and retain the aesthetic of that period. The more interesting version is in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, where bars occupy Hinterhöfe — inner courtyards accessed through building entrances — that require local knowledge to find. These are not speakeasies by design but function as such by geography.

Best for: Underground bars where the architecture is the point and the atmosphere is genuine.

Lisbon

Lisbon has a tradition of small, dark, cave-like bars in the Alfama and Mouraria hills — buildings carved into the hillside with low ceilings and dim lighting that is structural rather than designed. The fado houses in the Alfama operate in spaces that feel underground even when they're not, and the late-night bars in Bairro Alto and Cais do Sodré that open after midnight are the closest thing Lisbon has to the speakeasy tradition. The city rewards walking into unmarked doors in the right neighbourhoods.

Best for: Bars where the architecture and the music do more work than the concept.

Vienna

Vienna's cocktail bar scene has developed seriously in the past decade, and a number of the best bars operate in cellar spaces under the Innere Stadt and the Naschmarkt area. The tradition here connects to the city's coffeehouse culture — Vienna has always taken its drinking spaces seriously as places for extended occupation. The underground bar scene in Vienna is more polished than Budapest but less commercial than it sounds: small cocktail bars in historic vaulted spaces, operating for a local clientele.

Best for: Underground cocktail culture with Viennese precision and an actual cellar.